The generation of the utopia: Itinerant curriculum theory towards a ‘futurable future’

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Pepetela’s novel The Generation of Utopia, the article situates and dissects the role of a group of intellectuals within a radical critical curriculum river, working towards a more just society and education, and enhancing a utopian generation. The article emphasizes the erroneous persistence of intellectuals associated with such generation in working fundamentally within a Modern Western Eurocentric platform; it underlines how the battles between dominant and counter-dominant traditions could not avoid the epistemicidal nature of the curriculum and drove the field into a theoretical involution, a regression. The paper argues for the need to decolonize Modern Western Eurocentric counter-dominant approaches; and advances the itinerant curriculum theory, as a just approach to champion the struggle against the curriculum epistemicide – a decolonial turn. The article ends calling for ‘the death’ of traditional ways to produce critical theory – Eurocentric fully saturated – as a way to de-link the critical theoretical out of the coloniality matrix, and in so doing, honoring the rich legacy of the generation of utopia.

KEYWORDS:

• Itinerant curriculum theory
• critical theory
• curriculum involution
• coloniality
• de-linking
• decolonial
• generation of utopia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The examples are countless. For example, in Spain the critical river flows into the education and curriculum field through the works of Jose Gimeno Sacristan, Julia Varela, Mariano Enguita, Jurjo Torres Santome, and many others; in Brasil through the works of Paulo Freire, Tomaz Tadeu da Silva, Antonio Moreira, Nilda Alves, Dermerval Saviani, Gaudencio Firgotto, Alfredo Veiga Neto, and more recently Elizabeth Macedo, and Alice Lopes, and others; in Argentina and in Mexico, one cannot ignore the crucial work of Adriana Puigros, Alicia de Alba and Jacqueline Zapata; in South Africa, intellectuals such as Jonathan Jansen, Salim Valley, Juliet Perumal; in Portugal, due justice needs to be made to the contributions of Steve Stoer, Luisa Cortesao, João M. Paraskeva, Almerindo Afonso, Maria Alfredo Moreira. In this regard, see Darder et al. (2016).